Learning Method

Last night I was reading through my “Ethernet Basics” and “Spanning Tree” notes and thought to myself – “Can I realistically take in all of my notes using this approach in the time I have left? ….and then also answer probing questions?” à an easy approach would be to hammer-away at Boson ExSim and hope it covers everything I need, in the event that I should come across something I don’t know the answer to I can then go away and look-it-up….
If I know myself as well as I hope I do, I know that just won’t work, I’ll get complacent and bored….  by complacent I mean I’ll read through my notes thinking “yeah, yeah, ok…..” and then when I’m quizzed about specifics I might begin to get into a panic (“should I re-arrange the exam?…..”)

I decided last night that I need to be more ‘dynamic’ in my approach to studying down the home stretch and therefore began to create myself a ‘quick-fire workbook’.  The idea being that for each technology I reach: I read through my notes converting key points into questions à I then add the questions to my workbook à answer the questions without my notes available during the same evening à study more if required à use Boson ExSim à and then during lunch the next day run through my workbook again.

And here is what I have put-together, it’s probably not everybody’s cup-of-tea but it seems to be working for me.

The beginnings of the workbook can be found below:

CCIE R&S Quick-fire Workbook
(Note. Rename to .xls)

Please let me know what you think about the idea/workbook.